Bounced and broken
like a bad melon
Hot hag screech
tears skin away.
Circus parade tramples
goodmen and bad.
Hooves and clown shoes
cannot crush
the itch in my chest.
I'm a bad melon,
a sickback stealer,
a taken place
at the foot of the pillar.
Rising black
above the sinkhole,
like the stinkover
limewater pitwash
steaming snowfield.
Break off the rind rot
scrape away the mink musk
in a bad place, freezing
on the steppes of Nebraska
not far from Oaxaca
where Ulan Bator goes to gamble.
My pith is too feverish
in the school of mosquitofish
who gorge and spit out the seeds.
Harpoon the lungfish
with plunger and barbgig.
Scoop out the smelt
in the cold grunion sein.
The babyhair crookleg
is out in the wash house,
with salted green cabbage
in the picklecrock
under the floor.
This poem is full of good water and bad water.
We are water. Each of us is a sea unto itself and at the same time, a drop in a vast ocean.
Water is both powerful and fragile. if you poison the water, everything in it and from it is poisoned as well.
I have membranous glomerulonephritis. It is a chronic kidney disease. When your water isn't right, all your priorities are knocked into a cocked hat. On a very personal level, my water is broken and can never be truly fixed or healed.
The water in Lake Superior is under a grave threat. The entire world's water supply is under threat. The political struggles over water in Detroit and Ireland are the opening salvos in a long water-war. Mining and fracking will put Mother Earth's kidneys in a bad way. Don't let it happen.